EDUCATION TO UNDERSTAND THE WORLD & CHANGE IT FOR THE BETTER

I shared my thoughts on the government pestilence with year 13 who were a kind enough captive audience to listen carefully and nod sagely. I even gave them a trailer: they say that grammar schools build a meritocracy. I’m thinking about meritocracy, and so should you.

Obviously, if you’re not an aristocrat you’re something else and plebeian isn’t a friendly word, as the MP for Sutton Coldfield discovered on his bicycle. The other Michael Young – the sociologist not the curriculum thinker – invented ‘meritocracy’ in 1958 to help us consider alternatives in an egregiously unequal society. What happens, he said, if merit isn’t birth but is equated with intelligence-plus-effort, if its possessors are identified at an early age and selected for appropriate intensive education, and there is an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications? What if the obvious by-product of such a meritocracy – letting the devil take the hindmost – is the best way to order society? Theresa May isn’t saying that, of course. Certainly not.

But the quantification, test-scoring and qualifications happened in any case via the language of deliverance to the whole of state education, to see if it was working or not. Perverse incentives followed and the honourable pursuit of educating the nation’s young was devalued by bungling. I’ve said it until I am actually, OMG literally, blue in the face: if you measure a school using the same calibration as you measure a child’s results, then the results are king and the child is forgotten. We have to find a way of measuring what we do that is strong and steady enough to carry the weight of society’s hopes for the future. This year? Will a Progress Score centred on zero do it? (‘What do we want for our schools? Nothing’). But, instead of seeing if this works, another structural diversion has been plonked into the middle of the road.

Furthermore, Mrs May has robbed me of one of my glibber aphorisms. ‘Meritocracy’ I used to rant ‘just gets you a cabinet full of Old Etonians.’ This new cabinet is startlingly state educated (hurrah!) and want to make Britain fairer by opening the gate to meritocracy to the children of the poor. Surely it’s churlish to keep objecting?

Human beings have merit because they exist. Children have merit by being born. There is nothing that adds or detracts from the merit of a child’s life. An unreliable test score highly influenced by family prosperity and taken on one day does not ascribe merit. Winning the FA cup is a meritorious thing to do. Finding a cure for Alzheimer’s, organising a Tenants’ Association, standing up against bullies or winning the Nobel Prize for Literature all have merit, but so do people who have done none of those things. The merit of the child is that he contains within himself everything about humanity. A child does not have to earn worth: she deserves it because she is a tiny thing, a sticky toddler, a noisy infant, a furious fourteen-year-old, a glorious, glamorous nearly-adult ready to take on the world.

A comprehensive school is a work of art, a vision every bit as worthy as the NHS and every bit as hard to make work. Every generation understands more about human worth. Our education system has to understand this and change the world for the better. We need support and understanding and a commitment to the worth and value of every child so that we can help every single one of them fulfil their potential. Of course, if private schools were abolished so that politicians’ children met disadvantaged children, and all schools were properly funded, that would be a progress.

Education is difficult and complicated and can’t be tied to the insights of the past. The Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, blessings upon her mortar board, understands that too. She’s looked the Consultation in its shifty eye and declined to be dragooned. ‘We have no experience running schools. There are many wonderful teachers and head teachers throughout the country and I think it’s frankly insulting to them to suggest that a university can come in and do what they are working very hard to do and in many cases doing it exceptionally well.’

I demonstrated my exceptionality by telling Charlie he had his sweatshirt on back-to-front. In a muffled manner he told me that he preferred the wavy lines to the writing, but I think his mind was on football when he got dressed. His classmate Hayley asked me how I coped with the bleakness of existence. I told her Tallis loves optimism, so we had to laugh. Nicky admired my silver boots and the GCSE Maths retake test. Mr Tomlin and I discussed the great mysteries of life and agreed that his questions were more important than mine (‘Is there a God?’ vs ‘Why do girls need to regroup and hug immediately after assembly?’).

Any listener to Desert Island Discs knows that the Prime Minister is a High Church Anglican. She should have a deep understanding of the theology of the incarnation, of the immanent eternal worth of the human child. That’s religious language but it’s what good schools do every day. There’s merit in that.

I don’t need to tell you the facts, you can read them anywhere. Grammar schools do not help social mobility, they restrict it. Grammar schools do not spread advantage, they entrench disadvantage. Progress for clever children is not better in grammar schools. Very few children from disadvantaged households go to grammar schools.

​Grammar school places are won by children whose upbringing predisposes them to pass the 11+ or whose parents have paid for tutoring. Grammar schools existed when we needed a blue-collar/white collar work force. Passing the 11+ and keeping that achievement level going is exceptionally stressful for children who know that their parents have their hearts set on it.

I’m writing carefully for a particular audience. If you live in a selective area, you’ve got to make the best of it. I’m not getting at you, but the state should protect children from harm, and selection harms children. School places should be planned, not established on a whim. Free School sponsors should be able to demonstrate that any educational provision for which they clamour, to which a Free School is apparently the answer, serves the needs of the democracy, the common good. Greening’s bizarre assertion that selection can be casualty-free is from someone who hasn’t thought through what that means to the child who is not selected.Intelligence is not fixed at 11. The 11+ is a poor indicator of anything but family income. A child may be good at tests or too distracted for tests at 10 or 11 but that means precisely nothing about his or her chances in the future. Intelligence isn’t about to run out and challenging academic education does not have to be rationed. It’s not a zero-sum game unless the structures make it so.

This school is in Greenwich. We are fabulously comprehensive, educators for the world city. Over our southern borders lies selection. Sometimes our year 11s go to look at the grammar schools when they’re deciding about whether to stay on with us. Sometimes a child likely to get a hatful of top grades at GCSE tells us that they have definitely decided to go to one of the grammars. We tell them the facts: that they’ll do as well as or better here and that others in their position have come back, sharpish. They look embarrassed and tell us that their parents have their hearts set on it or ‘My community think this is best’. What would you say?

Grammar schools are a proxy for parental fear: so here’s what we’re talking about when we’re talking about grammar schools. ‘I don’t want my child’s education to be dragged down by slow, naughty or disrespectful children. I don’t want her to learn bad habits or fall in with the wrong crowd. I want him to make his choices within a limited range of options so he can’t make a mistake and end up on drugs and die young. I want him to get the kind of job that posh kids get. I want him to be happy.’ Of course you do, but hoping that your little one is a quick acquirer by the age of 10 and therefore insulated for life doesn’t make sense. It certainly doesn’t make for a stable, just and excellent education system for everyone’s little one.

Parents’ fear is rooted in another zero-sum myth: comprehensive schools are all terrible so we need to replace them with grammar schools for 20% of children because there isn’t enough good education to go around. But comprehensive schools are not all terrible. Very few of them are terrible. Some grammar schools are terrible. Most comprehensive schools are very good and loads of them are absolutely fantastic. The postcode selection trope trotted out by the PM - that good comprehensives only exist in rich areas – is just not true. London proves that, as HMCI (a man incapable of telling it other than it is) has trenchantly said. Tosh and nonsense indeed.

This isn’t policy, but education as nostalgia, a dog-whistle to a bygone era of class distinction and limited mobility. Even David Cameron called it ‘splashing around in the shallow end of educational debate’. It’s part of the anti-intellectualism of the Conservative government, where anyone on top of the facts, from sugar to Europe, is disregarded as an expert. It is the stuff of despair.

When our sixth form leave us we tell them to be kind to people at university who haven’t had their advantages, whose parental choice of school for them has made them uncertain about people from different backgrounds. We tell our young people to share their ease and confidence so that the gifts of a comprehensive education are shared with those whom privilege has restricted.

We do this because comprehensive education is an honourable and visionary undertaking every bit as important as the NHS. It preserves the fabric of our democracy and gives us all the chance to lay the foundations for a model society. These great schools work brilliantly for all our children. Parents love them and communities thrive. We have everything to lose as a nation if they are destroyed. We should rise up as one against this shallow, cynical, divisive, wicked and ignorant project.

CR7.9.16

Distant star:We should never judge children by their qualifications. We need to get out of this mess.

​​We have about 600 new starters every year in year 7 and 12 and by the beginning of October everyone’s largely settled in. Those who are showing signs of regret, rebellion or difficulty are coaxed along a bit. New staff can find their way from classroom to staffroom and home without a minder or string. We’ve looked over the results, worked out what to do next and where the holes are. Performance Management is done, new shoes defeated. 75% of plans are underway and the other 25% recognised as ridiculous ideas.

​By half term the engines tick along nicely. We’ve had open evenings and the new starters are confident enough to do the selling for us: the books are open for next year. By Christmas we’ve got going on parents’ evenings and mocks and looked next year’s budget in the eye. Predictions are telling us what we want to hear, or not. Action is being taken on two thousand fronts.​By January, we’re halfway through the year. The countdown clocks in assembly appear to speed up. We’ve got used to each other. Tallis is universally cheerful but Year 7 are also terrifically enthusiastic, year 8 cocky, year 9 irritating, year 10 gloomy and year 11 working like Trojans. Year 12 are in denial and year 13 beside themselves. Awkward squads are decommissioned. At February half term we work out what needs fixing and panic about the arrangement of weeks before Easter. I call for the Easter holiday to be fixed, but not to anyone who can make the slightest impact on it. We worry about the exams and terrify ourselves with mad rumours of this year’s government interference.After Easter we’re like hamsters on a wheel for weeks. The exams are here for good or ill, we sort out staffing and the budget. Everyone over 15’s panicking about something. Then there’s another hol with revision sessions, and a mad rush to get everything finished for the summer and the new year? All in place? Off we go.

Over the summer holiday we worry about the exams. A bit of time to reflect and it washes over you. I’ve worried about results in areas of outstanding natural beauty and in front of the major cultural artefacts of the world, in spiffy new museums and edgy galleries of modern art, over exotic cuisine and accompanied by interesting wines, on trains, boats and planes and in cathedrals ancient and modern. All that being said, I’m reasonably good at compartmentalising until the final 24 hours. This year I then betook myself to Edinburgh and drowned paranoia with bagpipes and detective stories.

On the day, we meet at school and fulfil our various roles. The news comes to me in the form of himself in shorts, with a post-it. This year’s post-it was a jolly one. Good, good, good news all round. Big smile, shoulders back, stand up straight, certificates in envelopes, smile for the camera.

So September, this September, is as it should be, full of hope, excitement and new beginnings not regret, recrimination and exhumation. We re-embark and launch out from the quay for another year at sea, ready for any weather. Sea boots on for September. Welcome back!CR 30.8.16